Brief Summary of Minutes of Annual Meeting

Technical program: The meeting began at 8:30 am on Thursday, July 14 with opening remarks by Mark West and Larry Chandler, Associate Director, ARS Northern Plains Area. Technical presentations in the morning session were given by Rob Tempelman (Mixed model analysis of microarray data: Some issues we're struggling with), Rich Alldredge (Structural equation modeling) and Mark West (Analyzing spectroscopic data with methods of partial least squares). The theme of the afternoon session was statistical problems in precision agriculture. Presentations were given by Walt Stroup (Mixed models and design of experiments), Jeff Willers (Spatial information in precision agriculture management of cotton) and George Milliken (Using spatial information in the design and analysis of experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of precision agricultural management systems - coauthored with Jeff Willers and Chuck O'Hara). The afternoon session ended at 5:00 pm. Business meeting: The business meeting began at 8:30 am on Friday, July 15 with Ed Gbur presiding. Mark West and George Milliken were thanked for providing an enjoyable meeting. The following items were discussed. (1) Next year's meeting will be held on July 13-14, 2006 at the University of Wisconsin with Jun Zhu as host and Don Bullock as Program Chair. The 2007 meeting, which may be joint with USSES, was tentatively scheduled for Utah. The 2008 meeting was tentatively scheduled for Ohio. (2) It was decided that the NCR project label should be converted to NCCC to be consistent with the new national project labeling scheme. (3) The Spatial Workshop given on the day after the Conference on Applied Statistics in Agriculture at Kansas State was discussed. There were approximately 25 attendees from Kansas State and USDA. Feedback from participants varied greatly and reflected the diverse backgrounds of the audience. A workshop proposal has been submitted to the Tri-Societies (ASA, CSSA, SSSA) for their 2006 annual meeting. Additional potential meetings at which the workshop could be presented were discussed and several people volunteered to contact the host societies. Disciplines included weed science, plant pathology, range science, agricultural engineering and precision agriculture. The spatial workshop committee will continue to revise the content and possibly add a spatial point process module. (4) Larry Miller presented a report on CSREES staffing, program reviews and the current status of the FY2006 budget. (5) Project members were reminded to send their contributions for the accomplishment, output and impact sections of the annual report to Ed Gbur (egbur@uark.edu) as soon as possible. The target completion date for the report is mid-August so as to avoid the beginning of fall semester and the project renewal process. (6) The current project is due to expire on Sept. 30, 2006. The renewal process will take place this fall. The deadline for each step in the renewal was discussed. Members were reminded that a new Appendix E form will need to be filed to retain membership on the renewed project. The writing committee will consist of Bruce Craig, Ed Gbur and Rob Tempelman. (7) The group discussed topics which would be included in the renewal. It was decided to continue with mixed models and spatial statistics, especially as they relate to statistical modeling of agricultural systems. Discussion then focused on the increasing number of collaborative projects in which large the numbers of variables are collected on very few experimental units and traditional statistical analyses are often not applicable. Examples of such application areas include biotechnology, precision agriculture and chemometrics. It was decided that the new focus would be on this type of statistical problem. The current project proposal was reviewed with discussion centering on using it as the basis of the renewal proposal. The meeting adjourned at approximately 11:00 am.

The spatial statistics workshop was presented to a group of 25 Kansas State University and USDA scientists in Manhattan, Kansas in April 2005 by Ed Gbur, Jun Zhu and Mary Christman. Contacts are being made with several subject matter societies to offer the workshop in conjuction with their annual meetings. In addition, committee members have reported the following project related activities. Selected presentations at the 2005 Kansas State University Conference on Applied Statistics in Agriculture by: Meek, D.W. and M.D. Tomer. Characterizing the discharge distribution from small agricultural watersheds. Zhu, J. and G. Morgan. Nonparametric block bootstrap for analyzing repeated-measures and spatially correlated data. Poster presentation entitled "Recommendations for fitting log profile data" by D.W. Meek at the 2004 American Society of Agronomy annual meetings. Several project members have become involved with the USDA-ARS Precision Agriculture group. Ed Gbur spent his sabbatical leave in the Statistics Department at the Ohio State University working with Noel Cressie (OSU) and Yongtao Guan (University of Miami) to develop methodology to analyze spatial point processes on cylinders and truncated cones. The research was motivated by collaborative work between Ed Gbur and entomologists at the University of Arkansas to model the spatial attack patterns of red oak borers on oak trees. Ed Gbur is a member of an interdisciplinary team of scientists at the University of Arkansas for a project entitled "Effectiveness and optimization of BMPs in improving water quality from an agricultural watershed" which was funded by USDA-CAEP. A portion of the project will involve the analysis of spatial data. Bruce Craig served as chair of the Purdue School of Science Spatial Statistics Search Committee. He was also named Director of the Purdue University Statistical Consulting Service and a University Faculty Scholar. Rich Alldredge provided complex mixed model analyses for the Spokane County Direct Seeding Project. The project was funded by USDA-SARE to Washington State University Extension Service. Rich Alldredge served as an external reviewer for a proposed project entitled "Estimation and Calibration of Dose-Response Functions" for the Idaho Agricultural Experiment Station. The project will involve mixed model analysis of variance.

Ives, A.R. and J. Zhu (2005). Statistics for correlated data: phylogenies, space, and time. Ecological Applications. In press. Hartsock, N.J., T.G. Mueller, A.D. Karathanasis and P.L Cornelius (2005). Interpreting soil electrical conductivity and terrain attribute variability with soil surveys. Journal of Precision Agriculture, 6, 53-72. Jaynes, D.B., D.L. Dinnes, D.W. Meek, D.L. Karlen, C.A. Cambardella, and T.S. Clovin (2004). Using the late spring nitrate test to reduce nitrate loss within a watershed. Journal of Environmental Quality, 33, 669-677. Kladivko, E., J. Frankenberger, D. Jaynes, D. Meek, B. Jenkinson, and N. Fausey (2004). Nitrate leaching to subsurface drains as affected by drain spacing and changes in crop production system. Journal of Environmental Quality, 33,1803-1813. Malone, R.W., M.J. Shippilato, and D.W. Meek (2004). Relationship between herbicide concentration in percolate, percolate breakthrough time, and number of active macropores. Transactions of ASAE, 47(5), 1453-1456. Meek, D.W., J.H. Prueger, W.P. Kustas, and J.L. Hatfield (2005). Determining meaningful differences for SMACEX eddy covariance measurements. Journal of Hydrometorology. In press. Meek, D.W. and J.W. Singer (2004). Estimation of duration indices for repeated tensiometer readings. Agronomy Journal, 96, 1787-1790. Meek, D.W. and J.W. Singer (2005). An example of developing covariates for problems in precision agriculture. In Proceedings of the 2004 Kansas State University Conference on Applied Statistics in Agriculture. G.A. Milliken (ed). Manhattan, KS: Kansas State University. 270-278. Mueller, T.G., N.B. Pusuluri, P.L. Cornelius, K.K. Mathias, R.I. Barnhisel, and S.A. Shearer (2004). Map quality for ordinary kriging and inverse distance weighted interpolation. Soil Science Society of America Journal, 68, 2042-2047. Mueller, T.G., N.B. Pusuluri, K.K. Mathias, P.L. Cornelius, and R.I. Barnhisel (2004). Site-specific fertility management: A model for map quality. Soil Science Society of America Journal, 68, 2031-2041. Rosa, G.J.M, J.P. Steibel and R.J. Tempelman (2005). Reassessing design and analysis of two colour microarray experiments using mixed effects models. Comparative and Functional Genomics, 6, 123-131. Singer, J.W., R.W. Malone, D.W. Meek, and D. Drake (2004). Predicting yield loss in indeterminate soybean from pod density using simulated damage studies. Agronomy Journal, 96, 584-589. Singer, J.W. and D.W. Meek (2004). Repeated biomass removal affects soybean resource utilization and yield. Agronomy Journal, 96, 1382-1389. Tempelman, R.J. (2004). Experimental design and statistical methods for classical and bioequivalence hypothesis testing with an application to dairy nutrition studies. Journal of Animal Science, 82 (E. Suppl.), E162-E172. Tempelman, R.J. and G.J.M. Rosa (2004). Empirical Bayes approaches to mixed model inference in quantitative genetics. In Genetic Analysis of Complex Traits Using SAS. A. Saxton, (ed). Cary, NC: SAS Institute, Inc.149-178. Tempelman, R.J. (2005). Assessing statistical precision, power, and robustness of alternative experimental designs for two color microarray platforms based on mixed effects models. Veterinary Immunology and Immunopathology, 105, 175-186. Tomer, M.D., D.W. Meek, and L.A. Kramer (2005). Agricultural practices influence flow regimes of headwater streams in Western Iowa. Journal of Environmental Quality. In press. Zhu, J., Huang, H.-C., and Wu, C.T. (2005). Modeling spatial-temporal binary data using Markov random fields. Journal of Agricultural, Biological, and Environmental Statistics, 10, 212-225.